In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, I take you deep inside the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona—a place that, for one week each year, becomes the beating heart of global urban imagination. It’s a strange crossroads: urbanists, technologists, ministers, consultants, researchers, civic reformers, start-up evangelists, sovereign delegations, and the wandering tribe of people like me who have spent too many years inside megaprojects to believe the sales pitches but still care too much to walk away.

This isn’t an episode about glossy renderings, futuristic mobility pods, or the usual chorus of keynote optimism. It’s about the thing humming underneath all of that—the Smart City Industrial Complex, and the uncomfortable contradictions powering it.

On the surface, the technology is dazzling. Digital twins modeling entire metro regions in real time. AI mobility engines reshaping how people move. Micro-grids learning from their own failures. Civic data platforms slimming down enough for small towns to actually use. Tools accelerating at a pace dictated by Moore’s Law, not by the slow cultural physics of cities—the lived, human physics that don’t double every 18 months.

But the real shift this year wasn’t technological.It was geopolitical.

For the first time, the Global South wasn’t standing at the periphery of innovation—it was authoring it. Kenya, Senegal, Vietnam, India, Brazil, the Philippines, Indonesia, Colombia—each arriving not with borrowed blueprints but with sovereign visions rooted in their own cultural, economic, and ecological realities. Less optimization, more dignity. Less prediction, more participation. Less extraction, more agency.

And yet the structural tension persists—the one you can feel in your teeth if you’ve ever worked behind the curtain:

A global industry built on exporting efficiency too often ends up importing inequality.A planning apparatus fluent in the language of “inclusion” still stumbles when asked for accountability.A vision of urban progress remains draped—sometimes unknowingly—in the selective morality of empire.

So this episode asks the question no one wants to say aloud on the Expo floor:

Who gets to define the future of cities—and who gets erased in the process?

We trace the failures of top-down megaprojects across democracies and monarchies alike—projects that collapse not because of technology, but because no one bothered to ask people what they wanted.We look at the quieter revolutions unfolding in places like Medellín, Vienna, and even here in Barcelona—cities rediscovering that sovereignty begins with citizens, not sensors.

Because cities don’t need more dashboards.They need mirrors.They need memory.They need accountability baked into their governance, not patched in as an afterthought.

The next urban revolution will not begin in a command center, a render farm, or a procurement office.It will begin the moment citizens decide they will no longer be optimized out of their own streets.

Welcome to the reckoning, Citizen One.